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Just like in the English-speaking world, there are numerous books in Brazil that aim to explain why wokeism is bad. And, just like in the English-speaking world, those who tend to do it are from the neocon Right. By their chant, wokeism is bad because it threatens the West – which is tacitly identified with political liberalism. This is quite a political maneuver, as the name “West” goes back to the division between West and East of the Roman Empire, whose pieces, in the Middle Ages, were divided between the Church of Rome, in the West, and the Church of Constantinople, in the East. Both churches, the Eastern and the Western, are anti-liberal. Thus, what the neocons understand by the West is a political ideology that first appeared in a Protestant country, England, and then emerged, with universalist and anti-clerical features, in Catholic France.
Both liberal traditions are alien to Brazil, so the defense of the West here is foreignism. Of course, our law, our religion and our language come from Rome, and this makes us, in a literal sense, Westerners. But we belong to what West’s ideologues call the Dark Ages, because we were not liberated by the Reformation, nor by the Enlightenment. On the contrary: we were led by the intellectual HQ of the Counter-Reformation, the College of Coimbra. We are too darkish to be Western in the sense in which that word is used by its ideologues.
In the English-speaking world, there are leftists who criticize the wokeism, or, as they prefer to call it here, identitarianism (from identity politics). These criticisms tend to rely either on the French side of liberalism, condemning the particularism of struggles over race, gender, etc., or on orthodox Marxism, which only admits class particularism and, therefore, considers that identity struggles divert the focus from real issue.
In Brazil, after a storm of translations of neocon criticisms of wokeism, finally, a liberal right-wing publishing house issued Identitarismo (LVM, 2024), by Antonio Risério, a democratic leftist who was a Trostskyist in the last military dictatorship and joined the Counterculture. As Risério points out, the Left of his old times was not democratic. And this was perfectly normal, since democracy in Brazil first appeared with the Milk Cofee Republic (1898 – 1930) (which is widely considered corrupt to the core), and then returned with the end of World War II because of pressure from the USA. This is uncontroversial, and Risério comments that “at that time, the United States held democracy on, causing, among other things, Brazilian redemocratization, with the end of the Vargas dictatorship” (p. 270). Later, during the Cold War, Brazil would suffer a military coup supported by the USA with the alleged aim of saving democracy from an imminent communist revolution; and then, in 1988, again under U.S. pressure, Brazil would establish the New Republic, democratic and liberal. During New Republic, Brazil even had a president who worked for a NGO funded by the Ford Foundation, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. And the alternative to Fernando Henrique’s party was Lula’s party, which had among its founders people like Florestan Fernandes, another intellectual funded by Ford Foundation.
As usual, Risério takes a very good look at Florestan and the Ford Foundation and destroys their allegations against Brazil. This time, however, he highlighted a 2011 doctoral dissertation that did not receive the attention it deserved, and only became a book in 2019, issued by a paid publishing house. The book is A questão negra: A Fundação Ford e a Guerra Fria (1950-1970) (1950-1970) (Appris, 2019), by Wanderson da Silva Chaves. Based on this work, Risério gives details of how the New Left was a CIA project, which used the Ford Foundation as a façade, in order to foster an anti-Soviet left after Stalin’s death. The particular question was the Soviet propaganda based on U.S. racial problems, and Florestan claimed that Brazilian racism was worst than American racism.
As for the book’s script, Risério attacks identitarianism from all angles: accuses it of being contrary to the West, contrary to the Enlightenment and contrary to the interests of the working class. At the same time, he repeats his usual criticism that identitarianism is contrary to Brazil, and also claims that it is contrary to the values preached by the Counterculture, from which it originated. This last criticism is usually made by the French left; see their reaction to Me Too.
I think the most interesting novelty of the book is the attempt to document the arrival of wokeism in Brazil. From what Risério gathered, wokeism was first felt in universities that received money from the Ford Foundation. However, for the wider public, wokeism appeared on the internet in 2014, when forums on topics as diverse as atheism and animal rights were flooded with slogans such as “when the oppressed speak, the oppressor remains silent”. As we learned from Risério, left-wing anti-PT people, who share this impression, raise the possibility that PT is behind identitarianism. It would be a way of co-opting the civil society that rioted in June 2013 (when there was a series of demonstrations without a defined agenda, and from which the New Right emerged as a political force organized via social networks). But, as wokeism is global, it must have a global cause, and 2014 is the year that marks the beginning of war in Ukraine.
I do not believe, however, that the general vision of the phenomenon offered by Risério is coherent, because he idealizes the past of the Counterculture (which is a creation of the CIA), at the same time as he criticizes identitarianism (which is another creation of the CIA). Identitarianism, exported by the USA, must be criticized so that we can maintain democracy, which is an export from the USA. The complaint, in the end, is that we have bad imperialism and we should have good imperialism.
One thing that bothers me about the left-liberals’ writing is the tacit assumption that certain electoral choices are practically a crime. The vote for Trump, Orbán, Meloni and Fico receives this treatment in Risério’s work. But he goes further: the USA is no longer able to hold on to democracy around the world and not even at home (as they may elect Trump) and that is why “dark times” are coming. “Dark times”, he says on p. 272, “are suffered today in Putin’s Russia, in the Ayatollahs’ Iran, in Xi Jinping’s China, in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. And the democratic societies of the West are not safe from a terrifying immersion into the darkest darkness”.
Let’s take the most obvious example, which is Iran. I would not like to live as an Iranian woman, and I do not believe that homosexuals should be executed for the sheer consented satisfaction of their sexual appetites. I find it incoherent that Western feminists and gays who speak badly of their home countries and paint them as the worst place in the world to be a woman or gay according to their own values, while Iran and Saudi Arabia would be infinitely worse according to those same values. That said, what should one do? Throw bombs in these countries to force women there to wear shorts against their will? If I were born in Iran, maybe I would like to wear a veil and would be appalled by the imperialism that wanted to make me want to wear shorts. Just as, being Brazilian, I am against an imperialism that wants to force me to classify myself as a member of a white culture, and to treat black culture as something separate and distinct from my own culture, having I (just like Risério) been born in the “Black Rome”. What would be the alternative to dropping bombs? Fill it with payed propaganda, precisely as the Ford Foundation did in the countries within its zone of influence.
I think that this purely moral condemnation of the customs of foreign peoples only makes sense from a religious or a dogmatic perspective. And, in fact, the origin of the confusion lies in the little-known theological liberalism, which I have already discussed here in SCF. In short, Protestantism in the 19th century faced a split between fundamentalism and liberalism. The U.S. elites are morally and theologically liberal, and that’s where their mania comes from, a mania which consists, roughly speaking, of throwing bombs around the world so that homosexuals can walk around holding hands and women can have abortions after casual sex.
With Risério, the reader learns that neo-racism in Brazil is an evil that comes from CIA, which struggled to create a Left which is compatible with capitalism. As for issues relating to ecology, recreational drug use, sexual liberation and the subsequent normalization of abortion, all of this would be the result of a positive and spontaneous movement on the Left, which was renewed after Stalin’s death, and was – surprisingly – the sole responsible by the fall of the Iron Curtain. Lech Walesa, Prague Spring, Tiananmen Square students, all of this would be spontaneous. The CIA is very powerful, of course, but its actions are evil and, it seems, practically limited to imposing the North American racial model on Brazilians.
In fact, the CIA’s finger was on every agenda of the New Left. It turns out that the New Left had never been as homogeneous as it is today. I give the example of feminism. Risério criticizes nowadays feminists: “There is no ‘consensual’ sex between a man and a woman. […] It is worth saying, neofeminism condemns heterosexual desire. And this has nothing to do with the feminism of the countercultural era – the feminism of Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem” (p. 52). As far as I know, the proponent of the idea that “PIV = rape”, that is, penis in vagina is rape, is the feminist Andrea Dworkin, who was at university doing activism at the height of the Counterculture. And if political lesbianism was not strong in the 60s, it certainly did not reach its peak in the 2010s. It must have been around the 1970s and 1980s. As for Gloria Steinem, it has long been known that she worked for the CIA. (As for the CIA’s involvement in the exploration of other cultures and the drug hype, I reviewed an interesting book here at SCF.)
What seems very strange to me about intellectuals who are nostalgic for Counterculture is that they take it as a representative of the civilization to which they belong. But even when you come from a country like the USA, England or France, the fact is that this new morality, which they take to represent the West, is a blink of an eye in their History. Even an elderly progressive Californian should realize that his West was, for most of its History, “obscurantist”, because this thing about gays holding hands and women having abortions when they feel like it isn’t even a hundred years old.
What all this shows us is that propaganda is powerful, but it is not omnipotent. There is no amount of money in the world that can make Brazilians accept the dogmas of Florestan Fernandes and the Ford Foundation regarding race. Risério sees this well. In an even more radical way, however, there is no amount of money in the world that can make Brazilians accept Planned Parenthood’s propaganda. That’s why Globo doesn’t make soap operas with young women who have abortions, and not because of its tacit adherence to a capitalist system contrary to women’s bodily autonomy (actually, capitalists like Bezos in U.S. subsidize abortions of their employees). Capitalism matters because Globo wants to keep its audience. In countries with a Catholic background, it is often difficult to push abortion. France and Argentina are the exceptions.
I close this text by emphasizing that the book is very informative and has documentary value, even about the mentality of part of the Brazilian left that lived through the 1960s. To situate the reader who is unfamiliar with the subject, I explain that when the wave of wokeism swept Brazil in the last decade, its opponents had, so to speak, a critical mass already formed in the previous decade. I highlight five people and three books, in chronological order: César Benjamin, Antonio Risério, Peter Fry, Yvonne Maggie and Demétrio Magnoli. César Benjamin, in 2002, denounced through magazine articles the Ford Foundation’s efforts to say that Brazil was a more racist country than the United States; Peter Fry and Yvonne Maggie, very diplomatic, carried out a series of actions against the establishment of racial quotas in public universities, which culminated in a petition in 2006. As for books, in 2005 Antonio Risério publishes A utopia brasileira e os Movimentos Negros, which accuses the black movement of importing the U.S. racial categorization system and falsifying the History of Brazil; in the same year, Peter Fry published A persistência da raça, where he accuses the Brazilian black movement of repeating a book by Perry Anderson that is a defense of English colonialism as superior to Portuguese colonialism; and in 2009 Demétrio Magnoli publishes Uma gota de sangue, which is a history of racial thought that denounces the very important Durban Conference and Brazilian new racial policies. All this autonomy of Brazilian thought regarding the racial issue comes from Gilberto Freyre, and Darcy Ribeiro is also worth noting.
